I find it weird that this article acts as if Robert Hooke isn't particularly well known, and downplays his accomplishments somewhat. He's an influential scientist, with contributions in many fields, whose name everyone learns in high school (both in biology and physics class).
Newton despised him, because when Newton proved how springs should work from basic principles (resistance proportional to compression) Hooke said "I published that first" and got it named after him - the so-called 'Hooke's law'. But Hooke had published half a dozen possibilities in a speculative article, and proved nothing. Kind of the original spammer.
I'm not really interested in a to and fro off-topic argument, but I know from previous to and fros, every big European country has its own heroes of the enlightenment. I find proclaiming nationalist "we're special" ownership ugly and usually ignorant, which is why I commented.
Not explicitly. Instead, his/her argument has the form: "Every country claims to be the important country, and nationalists are bad, so it can't be Britain."
I commented because I thought that argument was badly constructed.
Of course, anyone can guess whether the argument's author supports the alternative argument (as you claim).
Newton was so prolific and is so well-known that he occupies approximately 90% of the mindspace of that period, as far as famous figures go.
He's similar to Einstein - everyone knows him, but who can name the other people who made great advances around that time Einstein? We're likely nerds, so we can probably name more, but I'd wager that most randomly selected people might know Oppenheimer, just because of his famous quote.
I can't help thinking of the false proof punishment in Anathem whenever anyone mentions the Baroque cycle.
There are so many bits of true history mixed in indistinguishably with irrelevant falsehoods-- which were especially irritating because I'd been reading swaths of Philosophical Transactions from the 1700s shortly before reading Quicksilver-- that I found reading it to be a punishment.
James Gleick's Isaac Newton is an excellent account of the time. It focuses on Newton's life and is quite brief, but still prepares you to recognize many of the cast in the Baroque cycle.
I would perhaps recommend The Clockwork Universe[0] instead, which is more or less exactly an overview of the characters and intellectual influences of the time.
Many of the scientific antiquities and papers of the UK end up at the Royal Society Library. Brady Haran has a nice video series named Objectivity[1] about objects in the archives done with their head librarian, Keith Moore[2].
The British should be a bit more proud of him.